‘Lived experience philosophy’ and our values

Toromiros has grown out of over twenty years of research in various forms, academic, artistic, practical and relational.  We have drawn on the work and wisdom of those who have gone ahead, increasingly aware that our current trained-in perception of the world is an often highly controlled product of relatively few voices, with both accidental and deliberate exclusions.  As such we retain a caution as to what is currently ‘known’ and about frameworks handed down from a small group of philosophers, artists and academics, whose work, overly reliant on the logics of the Enlightenment and post-modernism, has become increasingly detached from usefulness in everyday life. We are also cautious about cosmetic ideological adjustments to ways of thinking and being that have grown over centuries, and to the idea that simple right-opinion fixes can easily be implemented without work on the underlying values, power structures and sheer physical energy associated with being humans together.

Many philosophical positions crumble when faced with the demands of everyday life, as anyone who has trod on an errant bit of Lego in the middle of the night can recognize.  There are things that are terribly resistant to opinion formation.  To grow character and goodness that can survive difficulty and inconvenience takes time, intention, community and grace.

In our work we want to incorporate this awareness, so that our client community are not disappointed by things that fall apart at the first difficulty. This takes time and shapes the way we approach (and price) our work, and what we promise we can deliver.

What is quite fun to discover, however is that there genuinely are small adjustments to life that can reap enormous rewards.  These are often very personal but nonetheless, we aim to share with a sigh of relief and the laughter of sheer delight.